From: Mark McElhatten (email suppressed)
Date: Thu Sep 25 2008 - 23:15:19 PDT
THE WALKING PICTURE PALACE
Curated by Mark McElhatten.
October 2, 6,, 8 & 9 at ANTHOLOGY FILM ARCHIVES - 2nd Avenue and
Second Street
October 7 at Light Industry http://www.lightindustry.org/
Sunset Park Brooklyn at 55 33rd Street (between 2nd and 3rd Avenue),
3rd Floor
THREE PROGRAMS WITH NICK DORSKY
A SOLO PROGRAM OF WORK BY PAOLO GIOLI INCLUDING TWO WORLD PREMIERES
FROM 2008
THREE GROUP PROGRAMS WITH MANY PREMIERES AND SURPRISES NY AND WORLD
PREMIERES BY JULIE MURRAY SCOTT STARK MIRANDA RAIMONDI KERRY LAITALA
JESSIE STEAD DAVID GATTEN
CHRIS GEHMAN DANIEL RICUITTO BRUCE CHECEFSKY KEN JACOBS LUTHER PRICE
STOM SOGO
NATHANIEL DORSKY – SELECTED FILMS 1964 TO 2006 THREE PROGRAMS
Consummate filmmaker and author of DEVOTIONAL CINEMA, Dorsky returns
to the New York Film Festival this year on Saturday October 4th at
Views from the Avant – Garde http://www.filmlinc.com/nyff/program/
avantgarde/avantgarde.html
with the premieres of two new films, WINTER (2007) and SARABANDE
(2008). On the occasion of his return and his visiting semester at
Princeton, we present this selection from his oeuvre.
Dorsky will be here in person to present all three programs on
October 2, 6 and 9
NATHANIEL DORSKY – PROGRAM 1:
INGREEN (1964, 12 minutes, 16mm, color, sound)
“The first of three films depicting the emergence from adolescence.” –
N.D.
PNEUMA (1977-1983, 28 minutes, 16mm, color, silent)
“In Stoic philosophy ‘pneuma’ is the ‘soul’ or fiery wind permeating
the body, and at death survives the body but as impersonal energy….
The images in this film come from an extensive collection of out-
dated raw stock that has been processed without being exposed, and
sometimes rephotographed in closer format.” –N.D.
TRISTE (1974-1996, 18.5 minutes, 16mm, color, silent)
“TRISTE is an indication of the level of cinema language that I have
been working towards…. The images are as much pure-energy objects as
representation of verbal understanding and the screen itself is
transformed into a ‘speaking’ character.” –N.D.
Total running time: ca. 65 minutes.
–Thursday, October 2 at 8:00.
NATHANIEL DORSKY – PROGRAM 2:
A FALL TRIP HOME (1964, 11 minutes, 16mm, color, sound)
“The second in the trilogy, it is less a psychodrama and more a sad
sweet song of youth and death, of boyhood and manhood and our tender
earth.” –N.D.
ALAYA (1976-1987, 28 minutes, 16mm, color, silent)
“Sand, wind, and light intermingle with the emulsions. The viewer is
the star.” –N.D.
SONG AND SOLITUDE (2005/2006, 21 minutes, 16mm, color, silent)
“Conceived and photographed with the loving collaboration of Susan
Vigil during the last year of her life. Its balance is more toward an
expression of inner landscape, or what it feels like to be, rather
than an exploration of the external visual world as such.” –N.D.
Total running time: ca. 70 minutes.
–Monday, October 6 at 7:00.
YESTERDAY AND “TODAY!”
All the artists are expected to be present.
Ken Jacobs BINGHAMTON, MY INDIA (ca. 1971-72, 25 minutes, 16mm, silent)
“This unreleased film has not been seen in New York for nearly twenty
years. For many, Binghamton was an eye-opening experience that
brought cinema to life. For Jacobs it was an intrepid new beginning,
pioneering a new cinema department in a time and place far from the
here and now. This unlikely town became a mecca of experimental
cinema. But on most days it was an overcast twilight zone of
collapsed industry, where the trains didn’t stop anymore. This modest
and beautiful film features both constructed and spontaneous play
caught by Jacobs’s inimitable camera eye.” –M.M.
Ken Jacobs DEATH OF P’TOWN (1961, 7 minutes, 16mm, color, sound.
Starring Jack Smith.)
“After years of shooting my raging epic STAR SPANGLED TO DEATH,
starring Jack Smith, and after a few months of being on the outs with
each other, we got together for one last stab at friendship and the
making of a film in Provincetown, Summer of ’61.” –K.J.
Scott Stark HOTEL CARTOGRAPH (1983, 11 minutes, 16mm, color, sound)
A camera mounted on a movable cart, pointing down at the floor,
passes over a seemingly endless succession of gaudy carpets and
surfaces in a single shot through a major hotel.
Jessie Stead & David Gatten TODAY! (2007/2008, ca. 35-40 minutes,
digital video, color sound)
“Part transmutable daydream, part pseudo-haiku playground, part epic
prop comedy and maybe more. Please note TODAY! is a sun-lighted,
purposefully unfinished motion picture (an excerpted excerpt from an
episodic episode). All resulting ambiguities and continuity errors
represent the potential joys of misunderstanding and should not be
mistaken for irresponsible filmmaking.” –J.S.
Total running time: ca. 90 minutes.
–Monday, October 6 at 9:00.
COME SOFTLY -"BE CONTINUOUS OFTEN"
A Tenderfoot Walking Picture Palace AT LIGHT INDUSTRY
55 33rd Street (between 2nd and 3rd Avenue), 3rd Floor Brooklyn
http://www.lightindustry.org/
Films by Stom Sogo Luther Price Miranda Raimondi Julie Murray Scott
Stark Phil Solomon with several World Premieres and surprises.
Including a new 3D Chromavision piece by a surprise artist. Glasses
will be available at cost for the first fifty people.
“ I take my oath and I make my vow/For the tender things are upon me
now.”
from the song 1880 or so – Tom Verlaine
A quincunx of succulents
Subtle colors and forms
Succinct in dust.
Appropriate the pot
Assigned set each
For spill into Other
Always my core dream
Winding a garden
Secret in every sense.
from The Shrubberies – Ronald Johnson
So the tune which is there has a little piece to play. And the
exercise is all there is of a fast. The tender and true that makes no
width to hew is the time that there is question to adopt.
{… }
Cadences, real cadences, real cadences and a quiet color. Careful and
curved, cake and sober, all accounts and mixture, a guess at anything
is righteous, should there be a call there would be a voice.
From Tender Buttons- Gertrude Stein
Whittle me, I will shave down and husk,
I will rustle and snare
like a blind
rabbit twists eyeing Eden.
I will glisten.
I will clasp.
Tarpaper – huckleberry- turpentine and tin.
Radiant shimmers and razor straps
Look at where you are.
In there.
In there where I used to think nothing should ever be.
Where you should be, taking my pulse and bright honor
(seizures start…)
rifleshots and bleating lambs
sound of lambs
where there are no lambs.
The Undertaker’s Pillow Book (excerpt) – Darcy Shreve
for images and text for Scott Stark’s Speechless : http://hi-beam.net/
speechless
The hallucinated childhood, the painted veil (described by Shelley,)
the natural world the mirage ahead, underfoot and beneath the skin.
What are we made of? Sugar and snails hammers and nails, bliss and
rue, ten thousand layers of the onion. Wandering the earth from the
dustbowl to the marble index, from stardust to dust we shall become.
Presenting work old and new: World premieres : Speechless by Scott
Stark fearless symmetries of labia and landscape, YSBRYD by Julie
Murray a liebestod from the secret life of slugs. New epistles and
remixes from afar by Stom Sogo, mosaic musicals and indelible ink
from Luther Price, immersive blues from Miranda Raimondi,
Confectionary archeology and slices of Permian strata from Lewis
Klahr, outtakes and clips from unnamed sources, intakes from the
ghostlands from Phil Solomon, twice told fragments and hushed
surprises. – M.M.
–Tuesday October 7 at 8:00. Light Industry
PAOLO GIOLI
Often referred to as The Man Without A Movie Camera due to his
pinhole wizardry and lens-less camera work. A quiet force in the art
world since the 1960s, Gioli’s photographs and silkscreens are in the
collection of many international museums. A rediscovery of his
extraordinary film work was initiated by the double-DVD release from
Raro Video and a one-person show at the NYFF two years ago. Tonight
we will present two world premieres, CHILDREN and INTERLINEA, both
completed in 2008, along with other works in 16mm, 35mm, and digital
video, many of which are being seen in NY for the first time.
Children 2008, 7’, 16 mm B&W silent
I have always been interested in the sequencing of images in books,
where the possibility exists of imposing movement onto still images.
Even this brief film takes its departure from the sequencing of a
book that is animated but ends with inanimate images. A reflection on
a daughter of the assassinated President of the United States and on
another little girl: naked and dead, on a heap of peasants murdered
on a country road. On the one hand, a life of privilege in a great
mansion taken by a great photographer, on the other, death in the
dust, taken by a war photographer.
INTERLINEA
Frameline 2008, 5’, 16mm color, silent 24fps
Made from fragments of a found porno film, where the frameline, which
divides the images, becomes a mysterious plastic form, waggling(?)
in the center of the screen, vertically and horizontally. The blade
of the shutter sections the bodies of eros, realizing the desires of
the film image and its frame.
VOLTO SORPRESSO AL BUIO 16MM SILENT 18 FPS
"Volto sorpreso al buio" 1995
Film 16 mm bianco e nero, muto, 18 ftg/s, 6'
[Face Caught in the Dark] From old plates of an anonymous
photographer who worked in the 50s, I extracted this impossible film
(plates that had contributed to the composition of one of my little
books with the title Sconosciuti [Persons Unknown].
Frame by frame, plate by plate, with strips of reflected light and
strips of tens of faces, I tried to bring them into a single
cinematic stream, thinking about a solitary, single face emerging
from the darkness.
TRACCE DI TRACCE
Traces of Traces] Executed and printed with two hands, that
is to say, made using all possible means of imprinting the right
hand and arm on freshly applied ink, sand paper, stamps, etc.
Everything was done on non-emulsion clear leader.
COMMUNZIONE CON MUTAZONIE 16MM
1969
Film 16 mm bianco e nero, muto, 18 ftg/s, 7'
[Commutations with Mutations] Is composed using three different
formats, that have been made to co-exist: super-8, 16mm, and 35mm on
a single 16mm support, clear leader. The variations in size caused
the original framelines to overlap, subjecting them —and with them
their images—to a singular diabolical rhythm.
The abovementioned formats were glued together, one at a time,
fragment on top of fragment, using transparent adhesive tape.
FARFALIO
1993
Film 16 mm bianco e nero/colore, muto, 18 ftg/s, 10'
[Flicker] Cinematic flicker: flicker is introduced into the flutter
of butterflies shot from small books. My intention was, here as
elsewhere, to animate what is inexorably locked up in the fixity of
typographic ink in a book. in this attempt, I brought into play the
rhythm of some erotic film images, making butterflies and eros
pulsate together. As for the extraordinarily beautiful five minutes
of moth wings by the great Stan Brakhage: I would never have used
wings ripped from butterflies, even if they were… nocturnal.
SECOMDO IL MIO OCCHIO Di VETRO 35MM
1972
Film 16 mm bianco e nero, sonoro, 10'
(di questo film esiste una versione in 35 mm)
Vampa Productions
[According to my glass eye] The semi-scientific character of this
work is in some degree due to the stereo-stroboscopic visual
mechanism employed in its making. The careful and paradoxical loading
up of profiles alternating between negative and positive is aligned
along the axis of a soundtrack of super-synchronized percussions,
giving rise to a complexity which can be deciphered only by an
attentiveness of the degree required for a visual psychological test.
DEL TUFFARSI E Dell’ ANNEGARSIi 35MM
1972
Film 16 mm bianco e nero, sonoro, 11'
(di questo film esiste una versione in 35 mm)
Vampa Productions
[On Diving in and Drowning] The film relates the beliefs the author
held for a certain time concerning water and diving into it. It all
begins with a dive and with a whirlpool that never existed; two
visual prototypes on the basis of which the mischievous view of the
author created a filmic inversion of water and its flow, of the diver
and of the imaginary whirlpools. This expansion, unforeseen in
spontaneous natural phenomena is, however, foreseen by the very
little spontaneous nature of the diver, who, after repeated
efforts, ends by realizing a plunge which is at once fatal and desired.
ANONIMATAGRAFO
"Anonimatografo" 1972
(dedicato ad Alberto Farassino)
Film 16 mm bianco e nero, sonoro, 30'
[Anonimatograph] This film was shot a frame at the time using
laborious extreme optical close-ups. Anonimatograph: the reanimated
image of an unknown amateur at the beginning of the century who
becomes middle class as he focuses on friends, movie camera in hand,
indoors and outdoors surrounded by war and by his sisters. I have
tried to reconstruct an extravagant film diary from which I have
painstakingly torn out little pages of frames. These frames were
exposed and abandoned on negative on a
number of photographic reels, cut together at random in two sixty-
meter reels in 35mm and acquired by me for 500 Lire from a flea-
market vendor.Many frames were shot vertically, others only partially
exposed, sometimes properly developed, sometimes not. I tried to
animate these little reels using a flicker technique with light
stroboscopic touches; in short, a film that could
not be recommended to anyone. [I wanted] to create the possibility of
there being born from a non-film, a kind of pre-film: a little story
of an innocent anonymous filmmaker a bit like me. In this way,
superimposing my imagination directly onto layers of negative,
syncopating the frames in a sort of manipulated notebook—electrifying
them—in this cinematic mosaic of comings and goings,
I encountered Him, the involuntary author of my experimentations, an
insane cataloguer of images, divided between locomotives and ladies,
film and orphaned children, informal excursions and soldiers. In the
theatre, in the audience,some gentleman might realize he is watching
his own stolen images and kill me.
CINEFORON
1972
Film 16 mm bianco e nero, sonoro, 10'
[Cinephoron] A filmic homage to the German mime Helfrid Foron,
a student of Etienne Decroux who worked with acrobats and
tight-rope walkers. He frequently collaborated with contemporary
musicians, among them Mauricio Kagel.
My intention was to displace his gestures using a form of filmic
doubling employing the technique of creating bispecular-asynchronous
loops which mime—with extreme visual results—the actions and the
objects on stage to make them stand out and to distance them from the
action.
–Wednesday, October 8 at 7:00.
STILL LIGHT OUT
“I went to New York to leave your flowers of blood and light
In the Picture Shows I dreamed
of your birthmark in the shape of a pistol.” –Frank Stanford, “Blue
Yodel of the Desperado, after Pier Paolo Pasolini”
“Trying to whisper life came back, light came back.” –Jorie Graham,
“Spelled from the Shadows Aubade”
• Suspension
10 minutes, 16mm Double Projection, color and black & white, silent,
2008
At once distant and immersive, the horizon hovers, recedes and
emerges. Concerned with ideas of mutability and impermanence,
"Suspension" investigates possibilities of expansion, the dissolution
of ground/water/air, and relationships of proximity and distance.
Bruce Checefsky Pharmacy 4min 38 sec. 35 mm black and white 2001
“ Simply beautiful” – Guy Maddin
Pharmacy is based on Stefan and Franciszka Thermson’s influential
1930 abstract photogram film APTEKA. The Thermsons are considered the
most important filmmakers of the Polish avant- garde of pre WWII
Europe.Pharmacy is a chaotic anarchic assemblage of chemistry lab
measuring cups and spoons various size test tubes, tweezers, eyeglass
lenses, and a cornucopia f of translucent pharmaceutical equipment
seen as shadows in black and white reverse images.
Daniel Riccuito Greenwood Cemetery video 3D with Pulfrich filter 10
min.
In the warm light of late summer, just before dusk, I walked around
GREENWOOD CEMETERY with my wife. The iron fence separating us from
the cemetery grounds began to shimmer, alternately resisting and
focusing the deeper vistas beyond. Rebounding space - "Pulfrich!"
My idea here was to reverse depth. What I discovered, quite happily,
was that shocks and anomalies are to be expected - subjectivity
rules! - D.R.
Bruce Checefsky- Taureg 2008 7:30 sec. silent version 16mm black
and white photogram film.
A dramatic black and white abstract film, TUAREG is a melodious
assemblage of Alencon, Venetian, and Point D'espirit lace; artificial
silk flowers, plants and trees seen as shadows cast by pocket, tube,
and LED flashlights. Beautifully photographed in black-and-white on
outdated twenty-five year old direct positive film, the resulting
dense grain images evoke a veil of secrecy and tension surrounding
the film’s meaning. The visible division of the screen in half,
several simultaneous images, ruptures the illusion that the screen's
frame is a seamless view of reality.
Filmed in a private animation studio in Cleveland with experimental
filmmaker Robert Banks Jr. and artist Tina Cassara. Directed by
Bruce Checefsky.
Paolo Gioli - "Finestra davanti ad un albero" 1989 (dedicated to
Fox Talbot) 16 mm black and white silent 13 min.
[Window in front of a Tree] I have several English style windows and
this and a tree in winter have caused me to think about Fox-Talbot’s
window—his first image, perhaps. Carried out, as usual, with the
technique—but perhapsit would be better to say the discipline—of the
flicker, which is, “the undulation, trembling, quivering, flashing,
sparkling weakly” of the dictionary, in short everything of the”
cinèsi fosforescentica.” Drawn from a thin monograph (it’s worth
saying from typographic ink where there had been silver salts) I
tried to shake my window using his, where there had been a tree in
winter. Cross-dissolving between real and not-real, between fixed and
animated images of his lively works,seemed to me to reconstruct what
would have perhaps happened to Fox-Talbot, filming my window in
winter.- P.G.
Ken Jacobs - ALONE AT LAST 2008 digital 2 min.
Who wrote the Book of Love? A page torn from... the longed for moment
clasped at last. Encircled, swelling in time and flying apart. For
your eyes only. To be viewed with both eyes open in relative
darkness. No one will be admitted after the first two minutes. Viewer
discretion advised. Let no one tear asunder…
Kerry Laitala – Phosphene Dreams 2008 digital
a digital version working with the material basis for the film
Phantogram shot as it awakened upon a flat bed of revolving mirrors
and digital shuttering.
Chris Gehman- Refraction Series Canada • 2008 • 35mm (1:1.37)
5.5 min. • colour • silent
Refraction Series offers an experimental approach to optics, using
simple materials and techniques to generate a range of images of pure
light and colour in motion. The film is inspired by the ideas of
early scientists who investigated the nature of light and visual
perception, particularly the experiments and writings of the tenth-
century Arab mathematician/scientist Ibn al-Haytham and the English
mathematician/scientist Isaac Newton.
For Refraction Series, Chris Gehman worked in a darkened studio
with a variety of small light sources, inexpensive optics and
everyday objects that refract, diffract and otherwise alter the
character of the light passing through them. Unmounted lenses and
prisms, small apertures, bottles and drinking glasses, CDs and
liquids were used in a series of experiments to generate images that
were recorded on 16mm Kodachrome reversal stock – often with no lens
attached to the camera itself – and optically printed to 35mm. The
results of these experiments have been edited into a brief suite of
“visual music.” Refraction Series finds moments of beauty and mystery
in the movement of light itself, without reference to solid,
recognizable objects. It invites us to seek out the subtle but
rapturous effects of light that are all around us every day, and to
consider how the treasure of colour
Group show – Other artists and works to be announced.
–Wednesday, October 8 at 9:00.
NATHANIEL DORSKY – PROGRAM 3:
SUMMERWIND (1965, 14 minutes, 16mm, color, sound)
Part three of this trilogy. The world is seen from a larger view. “A
singularly direct and unpretentious evocation of summer life in
Dorsky’s home town.” –Ken Kelman
ARBOR VITAE (1999/2000, 28 minutes, 16mm, color, silent)
A gesture towards a cinema of pure being. Its atmosphere is haunted
by the period in which it was shot, the year of 1999.
THE VISITATION (2002, 18 minutes, 16mm, color, silent)
“A gradual unfolding, an arrival so to speak. I felt the necessity to
describe an occurrence, not one specifically of time and place, but
one of revelation in one’s own psyche.” –N.D.
Total running time: ca. 65 minutes.
–Thursday, October 9 at 7:00.
__________________________________________________________________
For info on FrameWorks, contact Pip Chodorov at <email suppressed>.